1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and information processing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, along with popularization of devices called smartphones and tablet terminals, a user has become able to enjoy browsing photos using a smartphone or tablet terminal or uploading an image to a server on a network. There is a demand to process, in a smartphone or tablet terminal, image data shot by a digital camera having an image capturing function as the main function. That is, as the function of a cellular terminal such as a smartphone or tablet terminal advances, the user can comfortably use a high-quality image browsing function including accessing a cloud in the cellular terminal, thereby increasing the number of use cases in which an image is used in the cellular terminal. There is also an increasing demand to use an image in a cellular terminal, for example, to use an image shot by a single-lens reflex digital camera for a blog or SNS, or to transfer a shot image to the cellular phones of friends to share it.
To cope with such use cases, it is convenient to connect a smartphone to a cellular terminal (for example, a digital camera) to allow the smartphone to browse image data of the digital camera. However, a cellular terminal may also browse image data the user of the digital camera does not want to show. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2010-154267 (to be referred to as literature 1 hereinafter) is known as a technique for browsing security by a digital camera. Literature 1 discloses an arrangement in which if a security mode is set in an image playback mode, it is impossible to browse image data unless user authentication processing is performed.
Literature 1, however, does not consider a case in which another apparatus such as a smartphone browses image data of a digital camera. In the security mode, the user needs to perform an authentication operation every time, thereby complicating the user operation. When transferring images shot by a digital camera to a cellular terminal such as a smartphone or tablet device, therefore, a complicated user operation is required not to transfer images which should not be browsed by the cellular terminal.